AL OLIVER : He’ll Tell You He’s Quite a Player and Has Records to Prove It, but He Wants to Hear It From Others

By now, Al Oliver figured, he’d be taking curtain calls, like Rose and Yaz and Carew, the other great .300 hitters of his generation, biding his time until they hung up his plaque in Cooperstown.

Instead, now playing for his fourth team within a year, Oliver sat in a beachside coffee shop here Monday morning and offered to produce a character witness who would testify that the world had failed to appreciate Al Oliver for what he was and what he has done. A world that had done him wrong.

“Here, call my best friend--he’s a dentist in Columbus, Ohio--he could probably tell you what you need to know,” said Oliver, scrawling the name and number of Dr. Chet Corbitt on the back of a business card.

Somehow, hitting .300 11 times, including the last nine seasons in a row, had not been enough. Nor had winning a batting title, or being an All-Star seven times, or playing on a World Series championship team. It didn’t matter where he played--Pittsburgh, Texas, Montreal, San Francisco, Philadelphia and now Los Angeles--Oliver felt he had been measured by a different standard. And he hadn’t measured up.

Chet Corbitt, the Columbus, Ohio, dentist, is almost 10 years older than Oliver but has known him for a long time. They both grew up in Portsmouth, Ohio.

“He’s going to be the only guy in the history of baseball to get 3,000 hits and catch hell getting into the Hall of Fame,” Corbitt said.

“He’s so shell-shocked by the stuff they’ve written about him, he’s almost afraid to mention his own name.”

And what are they writing about this man who begins the 1985 season with 2,676 hits, just 324 short of 3,000?

Here’s a sample from “The Scouting Report: 1985,” a book that purports to be “an in-depth analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of every active major-league baseball player.” It was prepared with the help of former big leaguers Brooks Robinson, Duke Snider and Dave Campbell. On Oliver:

“He is not a team man. He is a one-dimensional hitter who rarely walks and does not bunt . . .

“He has no speed, is not a threat to steal and is not aggressive at breaking up the double play . . .

“Because of his terrible defense, Oliver would be better suited to DH in the American League.”

In Oliver’s mind, it has always been that way. He has been forced to endure the slings and arrows of those too small-minded to recognize greatness, those too prone to seize upon the slightest flaw.

“Usually, the person who’s had the type of career I’ve had would be applauded,” Oliver said, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, where they could betray no emotion. “I have not been applauded, because they don’t know what’s going on.

“I was the only player on a particular team who has had the athletic ability to go to another position, to make that adjustment (which is) a test of fortitude and self-sacrifice. I’ve done it everywhere my whole career.

“Not too many players--no other player, it’s as simple as that, who has been a top player, has been called upon to do it (change positions) more often than I’ve had to do it. That’s a testament to my ability and my unselfishness as an individual. The team is more important than I. I’ve always been that way.”

For Oliver, that theme has become as incessant as organ music during a ninth-inning rally. It has been repeated wherever he has played, wherever he has been portrayed as something less than the ideal ballplayer--a “player’s player” and the “people’s choice,” as he describes himself.

“The news media can make you a god or a devil,” Oliver said. “It all depends on their choice.”

Now, here he is a Dodger, at 38 and beginning his 17th season, back in a different position. He’s in the outfield, where he started his career with Pittsburgh in 1969.

Already, the skeptics are having a field day. If Oliver’s arm was a liability at first base, where he has performed the last three seasons, they ask, how can the Dodgers expect him to start in left?

Yes, Oliver acknowledges, he couldn’t throw the ball more than 30 feet in Montreal in 1982, but that was because he had a bone spur in his left shoulder.

“You talk about pressure,” he said, “I hadn’t been in the field in a year (he was a designated hitter in Texas), I had a bone spur in the shoulder, and I was thrown into that situation. But I didn’t complain. Nobody even knew I had a bone spur, which is to my credit.”

But nobody really knows if he can play left now, either. He played five games in the outfield last season, and the only throwing he has done so far this spring has consisted of high, lazy lobs into second base. Occasionally, he has underhanded the ball back to the infield.

“All I’ve got to do is catch the ball, which is no big thing to me,” Oliver said. “I’m the last guy on this team that you should be worrying about. If the young kids do their job, the Dodgers can win.

“Al Oliver is a proven player. (The arm) is just something to talk about. There’s always got to be something negative to talk about. My arm will never be like it was before when I played the outfield, but by the time I get it stretched out in spring training, it will be almost there. It won’t be a problem.

“And if it is a problem, so what? Put somebody else out there, that’s all. I don’t think my career at this point . . . after a certain time I wish people could say, ‘Hey, we’ve knocked this guy enough.’ ”

When the Dodgers got Oliver from the Phillies in February, for pitcher Pat Zachry, the thinking was that Oliver had been obtained as insurance in the event that Greg Brock, a .224 hitter last season, flopped at first base. That still figures as Plan B, if Oliver can’t play left. But one of the first things Oliver did since his arrival here was to seek out Brock.

“I just told him, ‘Hey, look here, you’re the first baseman. I’m the left fielder. Now go out and do your job and don’t worry about me--please, I’m no threat,’ ” Oliver said, relating his conversation with Brock. “ ‘If you do what you’re supposed to do, and I do what I’ve done, we’re going to win.’ ”

When Oliver was with Texas, one player said of him privately: “He’s so egocentric, but he’s still going to help you.”

In Montreal, players referred to Oliver as Dr. Hall because he spoke of the Hall of Fame so often.

In San Francisco, Corbitt said, then-manager Frank Robinson “totally ignored” Oliver, walking wordlessly past his cubicle.

In Philadelphia, one writer said Oliver would sit in the clubhouse before a game in his black silk underwear, just staring into space.

“I can hit, run, throw and field,” Oliver said. “The only weakness I had came as a person. Being unselfish turned out to be my weakness in the big leagues, and that’s sad, because I remember when those kind of people were considered role models and team leaders. Those guys were always heroes. They still are but not in this case.”

Dodger pitcher Jerry Reuss was Oliver’s teammate at Pittsburgh. The rap that Oliver wasn’t a team player didn’t apply then, Reuss said. “The guy came to the park ready to play every day. I certainly have no problem with that.”

Said Corbitt: “He’s never been a guy that did anything but say, ‘Play me.’ ”

Where, then, does the reputation come from?

“If I had to guess, and it’s a big guess, I would say it’s a cultural thing,” Oliver said. “I’m not a prejudiced person, I don’t believe in it, but because I was black, and have an outgoing personality, a little different, that may be something that was taken the wrong way.

“I don’t know if I ever came across as uppity, but maybe my personality was kind of intimidating, kind of different.

“Rose was outgoing, too, he knows all his stats, but you never hear of Pete not being a team player.”

The classic example of his being maligned occurred in Pittsburgh, after his wedding, Oliver said.

“She’s a fair-skinned black,” Oliver said of his wife, Donna. “If you looked at her, you’d swear she was Caucasian.”

Sure enough, Oliver received hate mail from a few people who thought Donna was white.

“That’s a perfect example of my career,” he said.

If Al Oliver--who, it was once said, could hit .300 in a blizzard--had to splice together a highlight film of his career, it would include the 1971 season, which he played next to the late Roberto Clemente. “He carried us to a World Series on his back.”

It would include his first All-Star game, in 1972, when he was in the same clubhouse with Henry Aaron, Willie Mays, Bob Gibson and Tom Seaver.

It would include his first All-Star hit, in 1975, “off Catfish Hunter, a double down the left-field line.”

And it would include the All-Star game in 1982, the year he hit .331 and drove in a league-high 109 runs--”the best offensive year by any player since Stan Musial”--when the hometown Montreal crowd showered its blessing on an adopted son so often scorned.

Last season was the toughest of his life, Oliver said. His wife underwent surgery for a medical problem that he said was brought on by the stress of their many moves. “If that ever happens again, I’ll take my uniform off on the field and kiss baseball goodby,” he said.

“If my career ended today, I’d feel good because I could walk out proud, for two reasons,” he said. “I’ve never one time cheated the fans, and secondly, I grew up to be the person my parents wanted me to be, a good person.”

Just once, though, Al Oliver would like to hear someone else say that.